“Nahum Tevet’s installations are perceived as a three-dimensional elaboration of both pictorial experiences and the sculptural experiences of the abstract-geometric and conceptual art of the 1900s, from Mondrian to Cubism, Malevich to Constructivism, Post-pictorial Abstraction to Minimalism. The shapes of the singular elements that make them up are simple and linear: square, rectangular, cylindrical, parallelepiped. The way these elements are constructed, finished, assembled, the use of wood, the industrial paint and their dimensions place these objects in the realm of industrial design typical of widely spread products like low-cost furniture. The artist declares that the singular elements of the work can be considered artificial ready-mades: they are built in sequence as on an assembly line, and remain stored in his studio waiting to be found and used. 

Islands is potentially divided into what can be considered complete and autonomous sections, like an archipelago where every island has its own distinctive features and provides a specific landscape, a city in which each neighborhood reflects the spirit of its inhabitants, stages on which different shows can be put on simultaneously.

When viewing the entirety of the installation the reference to furniture overlaps with the reference to architecture. This is a utopian architecture, one that allows the viewer’s gaze to traverse the structures that hide nothing. Instead, the architecture serves to frame, it divides into levels, and it always does so in a way that is different and dependent on the one looking at the work. The division of some elements, at work thanks to the use of two different colors, and the doubling of others, creates the illusion of specularity: it’s as if these objects find themselves reflected in an environment that has been invaded by water. Within this environment, a few boats float creating a contrast between the rationality of the geometric shapes and the imaginative vision suggested by the piece’s entirety. The insertion of differently-scaled elements leads those who view the work to ask themselves if the difference in scale is caused by a play on perspective. The complete vision, as the artist specifies, does not explain the nature of what we are observing, and does not make the artificial world that the work gives life to any less ambiguous or devoid of hidden dangers”

D. Peperoni